Design for Social Isolation

Uscreates
Uscreates
Sep 3, 2018 · 6 min read

The loneliness problem

Around 6–13% of older people (or around 1 million people) report to be lonely, and while this proportion has not changed over time, the number of older people is set to grow, and the number of lonely older people with it.

Loneliness is bad for us. Evidence shows it can be as harmful to our health as smoking, and people with a high degree of loneliness are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as people with a low degree of loneliness. And while there is a difference between loneliness and social isolation (loneliness is a personal state of mind and is dependent on the quality of relationships; social isolation is when someone is cut off from friends and family, and is about the quantity of relationships), social isolation is a risk factor for loneliness, and older people tend to be more socially isolated.

But we don’t need the facts to tell us this. Try to imagine the last time when you felt lonely. Or think about how you would feel if a grandparent or parent did not get a call or have a conversation with anyone for a week.

It is a tricky, stubborn social challenge which requires a very human and empathetic response. It is a perfect challenge for a design approach, which is why we chose it for an episode on BBC Radio 4’s The Fix.

What is design?

We might typically think of design as designing a product: a car, a chair, a smartphone. But over the last 30 years, the field of ‘service design’ has developed, not to design ‘things’ but to design experiences and services, and its approach is also being applied to designing policies and social outcomes. Uscreates is a service design agency specialising in health and wellbeing. Other agencies focus on commercial or financial services, such as car rental services or banking apps. And Government also uses service design approaches in how it designs digital services (being pioneered by the award-winning Government Digital Service in the UK) and policy and legislation (led by Policy Lab in the UK and a growing number of other design labs in Governments across the world).

Essentially, a design approach means not jumping straight to a single, fixed solution but first understanding the needs of people who are experiencing the problem, collaborating with them and other professions to co-design a range of possible ideas, and then testing them out and improving the best ones over time.

Uscreates and many other organisations have been using design to improve lives for people in later life, improving access to social care or health treatment services, preventing poor health in the first place and changing how people can look after their grandchildren or stay in work longer. The design process has a number of features which make it distinct from more traditional ways of tackling social problems and makes it particularly effective for designing for older people.

Design understands and builds empathy with real people, challenging assumptions

Mostly, interventions for older people are designed by people without experience of what it is like to be older, which means they can be based on wrong assumptions. Empathy, or putting yourselves in the shoes of the person you are designing for is central to design process. The Helen Hamlyn Centre has pioneered the use of Inclusive Design, creating empathy tools such as gloves to simulate arthritis and goggles to give the wear the impression of glaucoma.

This is particularly important when designing technology. While it can offer huge opportunities around remote health monitoring and social connections, it quite often starts with the technological possibility rather than people’s needs. Uscreates have been working with Care City in Barking & Dagenham to test a series of new technologies — such as CanaryCare or Gatesmart — with older residents and get feedback on how they are using them.

Understanding people means understanding that there are different types of people. A 67 year old who is still working and looking after grandchildren will have a very different outlook and set of needs to an 85 year old with dementia living in a care home.

Design is aspirational. It doesn’t start with a fixed idea, and can reframe issues away from problems towards opportunities.

A critique made by the Centre for Ageing Better is that there are many negative connotations with ageing: icons of older people with sticks, wrinkly hands etc. Uscreates’ work for the British Council (mapping the use of design for ageing) showed how it can be used in both ‘problem solving mode’ to address acute, highly specific needs (for example for the 85 year old with dementia) as well as in ‘reflective and critical mode’ where it can start to challenge our social values around an issue and shift attitudes. Organisations such as The Age of No Retirement, campaigns like IDEO & SY’s The Powerful Now, and exhibitions like the Design Museum’s 2017 OLD: NEW are questioning how we view ageing which might help people to start valuing and planning for longer lives.

Design co-designs with people from different backgrounds to come up with lots of solutions

Issues like social isolation are complex (there are many different factors) and highly localised. The Fix workshop was in rural Gloucestershire experiences specific challenges of a limited bus services, internet and lots of empty second homes. Therefore it requires action by lots of organisations and agencies including community groups and individuals, not just the local authority.

BBC The Fix on elderly isolation in rural Gloucestershire

Design is collaborative and also looks to see what already exists — local assets such as people, places, values — to see how they can act as ingredients for solutions. Interventions such as Casserole (where people can donate extra portions of cooked food to those who can’t cook) and the Good Gym (fitness activities which do social good, such as running to have a conversation with an older person) build on and connect up the local assets that exist anyway and use them to promote social connection.

Design prototypes or tests out solutions early and continues to listen to feedback to iterate and improve them over time

If ideas can be welcomed from anywhere, they do need testing out and improving. Organisations such as Nesta and the Design Council have recognised this, and have set up Challenge Prize schemes which invite entrepreneurs, local authorities and others to come up with and test out ideas around ageing. Healthy Ageing is one of the four ‘grand challenges’ put out in the Government’s recent Industrial Strategy. And the RSA, whose Chief Executive Matthew Taylor co-presents the Fix, run the Student Design Awards which regularly feature briefs around ageing, and the winners are often those who think systematically about an issue and are aspirational about the type of society they want to idea to be part of creating.

The BBC The Fix workshop was based on a design approach. It spent the morning understanding the problem, before coming up with solutions in the afternoon. It included different local people and assets — a local police community support offer, local entrepreneurs and local tourist officers. Importantly, it included Robert — a 76 year visually impaired man who used a befriending services — helping both teams understand the issues and develop ideas. Having him there not only meant the teams were testing back with him whether their ideas would work for him but more fundamentally challenged their assumptions and helped flipped their questions around so they became ‘how can older people support younger people?’ and ‘how can we make retirement as aspirational as leaving school?’.

Written by

Uscreates

Recently joined the FutureGov family. Keep up to date on how we’re designing better futures here: https://blog.wearefuturegov.com/

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